It’s been two years since my last GiGhive Buzz chat with Melanie Edwards, who had then just finished recording her eighth album, ‘The Circle’, in Barcelona, Spain. A lot can happen in two years, and in Melanie’s case, a lot did. After a broken engagement ended her six-year relationship, Edwards used the experience to write her ninth album, which she named Lorelei after her engagement ring.

In Germanic mythology, Lorelei is a feminine water spirit who lures sailors with her singing. According to the folklore, Lorelei was betrayed by her love and accused of bewitching men. Narrowly escaping a death sentence, she was sent to the nunnery by the bishop. On her way there, she climbed a rock to get a last peak at the Rhine, and, believing she’d seen her love in the river, fell to her death. Legend has it that her spirit still sits on that rock, beckoning sailors with the sound of her voice, causing them to steer their ships into the cliffs.

No, Melanie Edwards didn’t throw herself into a river when her engagement ended, nor did she vow to spend her days perched on a rock, luring men to their doom; she did, however, write a record in 12 days, which in itself is no small feat in normal times, let alone after such an experience.
“My last eight records are extremely esoteric and lyrically vague, but not this one,” she says about Lorelei.
“I used the period following the end of my engagement to channel the hurt, rawness and confusion of that disconnect into sonic prose because I didn’t want to externalize the journey. Instead, I wanted to honor the experience.

“Six years of my life and a huge chapter just ended so I wanted to put it in an audible time capsule. I’ve had breakups before and went through my parents’ divorce, but nothing of this magnitude. The usual go-to for me was to throw myself into vice, distraction and anything but actually dealing with emotional pain. I knew as the healing process began that I wanted to utilize those primal feelings of loss, separation, solitude and chaos into song work because I knew I would write from a place of truth.”